Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Unbeknownst to me, and perhaps some of you as well, Epic has been charging customers data usage fees for quite some time. The EMR giant has been quietly dunning users 20 cents for each clinical message sent to a health information exchange and $2.35 for inbound messages from non-Epic users, fees which could surely mount up into the millions if across a substantial health system. (The messages were delivered through an EMR module known as Care Everywhere.)

To me, this announcement is troubling in several ways, including the following:

Charging fees of this kind smacks of a shakedown. If a hospital or health system buys Epic, they can’t exactly back out of their hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars investment to ensure they can share data with outside organizations.

Forcing providers to pay fees to share data with non-Epic customers penalizes the customers for interoperability problems for which Epic itself is responsible. It may be legal but it sure ain’t kosher.

In a world where even existing Epic customers can’t share freely with other Epic customers, the vendor ought to be reinvesting these interoperability fees in making that happen. I see no signs that this is happening.

If Epic consciously makes it costly for health systems to share data, it can impact patient care both within and outside, arguably raising costs and increasing the odds of care mistakes. Doing so consciously seems less than ethical. After all, Epic has a 15% to 20% market share in both the hospital and ambulatory enterprise EMR sector, and any move it makes affects millions of patients.

But Epic’s leadership is unrepentant. In fact, it seems that Epic feels it’s being tremendously generous in letting the fees go. Here’s Eric Helsher, Epic’s vice president of client success, as told to Becker’s Hospital Review: “We felt the fee was small and, in our opinion, fair and one of the least expensive…but it was confusing to our customers.”

Mr. Helsher, I submit that your customers understood the fees just fine, but balked at paying them — and for good reason. At this point in the history of clinical data networking, pay-as-you-go models make no sense, as they impose a large fluctuating expense on organizations already struggling to manage development and implementation costs.